5 Neighbour Dispute Myths That Aren't Actually New Zealand Law

Servy Team21 August 20268 min read

Every one of these five things sounds like settled law. People state them as fact in Facebook community groups, at the letterbox, at the Disputes Tribunal. None of them hold up against the actual statute or a real court decision. Send this to the neighbour who's sure they're right.

Myth 1: "It's their tree, they pay for the damage"

A tree from next door comes down in a storm and takes out your fence, your car, or your roof. The instinct is that whoever owned the tree owns the bill. That's not how New Zealand law treats it.

The standard is negligence, not ownership. If the tree was healthy and came down purely because of the weather, the general position is that nobody is liable, it's treated the same as any other storm damage, and you claim on your own home and contents insurance regardless of whose section the tree grew on. The exception is a real one: if the owner knew, or should have known, the tree was hazardous and did nothing about it, that's a different story. The High Court found exactly this in Plaza Investments Ltd v Queenstown Lakes District Council, where a council was held liable after a 30-metre poplar it had been warned about since 2005 fell on a motel; the council had reports flagging the tree as decaying and had only ever done visual inspections rather than acting on the recommended testing. The court's language was that a landowner has "a duty to take reasonable steps to prevent or minimise known hazards on its land from causing damage to its proximate neighbours." Ignoring a known problem is what creates liability, the storm itself doesn't.

Practically: if a tree looks visibly dead, hollow, or leaning and you've mentioned it to the owner, keep a record that you did, a text message is enough. If it comes down after that, you're in a very different legal position than if nobody ever raised it.

Myth 2: "My neighbour's security camera pointing at my house is illegal"

"Can I record someone without telling them?" was the single most-asked question in the Office of the Privacy Commissioner's public "Ask Us" service in the twelve months to mid-2024, ahead of every other privacy question New Zealanders raised, with neighbour security cameras named as a specific driver. The instinct is that the Privacy Act 2020 stops it. Mostly, it doesn't.

The Privacy Act regulates agencies, businesses, government departments, organisations, collecting and handling personal information. A homeowner running their own security camera in a personal, domestic capacity generally sits outside that framework altogether, the same way the Act doesn't regulate what you photograph on your own phone. The Privacy Commissioner's own guidance is direct about it: a neighbour's camera only comes back under the Act if the way it's being used is "highly offensive to an ordinary reasonable person," a genuinely high bar. A camera that happens to catch a slice of your driveway or fence line while covering the owner's own front door usually won't clear that bar on its own.

What actually turns a camera into a criminal matter is different, narrower legislation. The Crimes Act 1961, sections 216G to 216J, makes it an offence, carrying up to three years' imprisonment, to intentionally or recklessly capture an "intimate visual recording": someone naked, partially undressed, or in a state of undress, in a place they'd reasonably expect privacy, without their knowledge or consent, or to distribute one. That's a specific, deliberately narrow category, not a general ban on a camera's field of view crossing the fence line. An ordinary security camera catching someone gardening or hanging out washing doesn't come close to it; a camera deliberately angled to catch a bathroom window or a private outdoor shower is a different matter entirely.

For the ordinary case, camera angled a bit too wide, nobody doing anything intimate, the Commissioner's practical guidance is: talk to the neighbour first, ask them to reposition it away from your windows and private outdoor space, and if that doesn't resolve it, a complaint to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner is free and doesn't need a lawyer, though its power in a purely neighbour-to-neighbour case is more about mediation than enforcement. Genuinely covert or intimate filming is a police matter under the Crimes Act, not a privacy complaint.

Myth 3: "There's a right to light in New Zealand"

A hedge grows tall enough to shade a kitchen window and someone insists there's a legal right to a certain amount of sunlight, sometimes citing a "20-year rule" borrowed from English law. New Zealand has no such thing. Unless a right to light has been specifically granted as a registered easement over the neighbouring land, which is rare and has to be deliberately created, there's no statutory or common-law entitlement to sunlight crossing someone else's property.

What you do have, separately, is a path to force a hedge to be cut back if it's unreasonable, not because of a right to light specifically, but under the same Property Law Act 2007 provisions that let a court order any tree, hedge included, trimmed where it's causing undue harm, covered in full in our overhanging trees guide. There's no fixed maximum height in the legislation; a court weighs whether the shading is genuinely unreasonable against how much hardship trimming it would cause the hedge's owner. It's a real remedy, just not the one most people think they're reaching for when they say "right to light."

Myth 4: "If their shed is over the boundary, they have to tear it down"

A survey turns up a fence, a shed, or a driveway sitting partly on the wrong side of the boundary, sometimes by centimetres, sometimes because whoever built it decades ago never checked. The assumption is automatic: it's on my land, it comes down. Courts don't default to that outcome.

Under the Property Law Act 2007's encroachment provisions, the affected owner can apply to the court for relief, but "relief" covers a genuinely wide menu, not just removal. A court can order the structure removed, but it can equally order an easement granted over the encroached land so the structure can legally stay, order compensation paid to the affected owner, or, in some cases, order the affected strip of land transferred outright to the person who owns the encroaching structure. Which outcome a court lands on depends on things like how the encroachment happened, whether it was a genuine mistake versus a deliberate land grab, how much it would cost to remove versus how much it's actually harming the affected owner, and what's fair between the two of them. A shed that's sat two centimetres over a boundary for fifteen years with no real impact on anyone is a very different case, and likely a very different outcome, from a fence deliberately built a metre into a neighbour's section last month. If this is about the fence itself rather than what's built over the line, the cost-splitting rules are separate again, covered in our boundary fence guide.

Myth 5: "A shared driveway splits 50/50, always"

Common on Auckland's battle-axe sections, a rear section reached by a driveway shared with the property in front. The assumption is an even split on repair and resealing costs, and sometimes that's exactly right, but not automatically.

The actual answer sits in the registered easement document for the specific property, not in a general rule everyone can assume applies. Some easements are written to incorporate the Land Transfer Regulations, which do specify an equal split. Others rely on the Property Law Act's own default instead, which asks each party for a "reasonable contribution," and a reasonable contribution isn't necessarily an equal one. In practice, that standard tends to land more on whoever uses the driveway more, which on a shared right of way is usually the rear property, since every trip in or out crosses more of the shared surface than the front property's does. If a shared driveway needs work and there's a disagreement about who owes what, the actual registered easement instrument on the title, not a rule of thumb, is what settles it.

Where the real recourse is

None of these five need a lawyer on day one. A text message flagging a hazardous tree, a polite conversation about a camera angle, an actual read of the easement on your title before assuming a 50/50 split, these solve most of it before anyone needs the Property Law Act. The genuine legal remedies, negligence claims, Privacy Commissioner complaints, District Court encroachment relief, exist for the cases that don't resolve that way. If the work behind any of this is what you actually need done, a hedge trimmed back to what a court would call reasonable, or fence and boundary work sorted properly the first time, Servy's Lawn & Garden and General Labour listings cover it.

Sources:

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